Declaration of two new Protected Areas

May 2019

Two new Protected Areas were recently declared through the Greater Kromme Stewardship (GKS) initiative in partnership with the WWF Table Mountain Fund, the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency and numerous private landowners. The two new Protected Areas are the Oubos-Grootrivier Nature Reserve and the Kromme-Geelhout Protected Environment.  A huge thanks to all of the private landowners involved – without their commitment to conservation, this would not have been possible. The GKS initiative aims to establish many more new Protected Areas in the Kouga and Koukamma region over the next few years using the Biodiversity Stewardship approach.

The Oubos-Grootrivier Nature Reserve is situated along the spectacular Tsitsikamma coastline, directly adjacent to the Garden Route National Park. The reserve conserves a pristine coastline with both sandy beaches and rocky shores, a significant part of the Grootrivier estuary system, and numerous threatened and endemic species that are typically associated with the Tsitsikamma coastline.  Besides being a scenic coastal reserve, the Oubos-Grootrivier Nature Reserve also forms part of a vital coastal corridor and the reserve thus plays an important ecological role by supporting the maintenance of critical coastal processes at a broader landscape level.

The Kromme-Geelhout Protected Environment lies on the peninsula where the Kromme River and the Geelhoutboom River meet. The Kromme-Geelhout Protected Environment contains a diverse range of habitat types ranging from riparian habitats and estuarine salt marshes, to thicket habitats and unique fynbos types like the Humansdorp Shale Renosterveld (which is nationally listed as endangered). As a result, the Kromme-Geelhout Protected Environment sustains an extraordinary diversity of threatened and endemic species, many of which are unique to the Kouga region. Extremely rare and critically endangered species have also been recorded on the Kromme-Geelhout Protected Environment, like the Salt Marsh Gecko (Cryptactites peringueyi) and Brunsvigia litoralis.